


Remembrance of a Weeping Queen

by angevin2



Category: 14th Century CE RPF
Genre: Bittersweet, F/M, Miscarriage, Queenly Intercession, Symbolic Birds, queenship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/pseuds/angevin2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne of Bohemia contemplates her purpose in life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembrance of a Weeping Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/gifts).



> In 1392, Richard had a quarrel with the London civic authorities that essentially boiled down to Richard wanting a loan, the Londoners refusing, and Richard moving the government to York until they knuckled under. They were reconciled thanks (at least in part) to the efforts of Anne of Bohemia. The poem [Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie](http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/rigg-and-carlson-maidstone-concordia) ( _Concord made between the king and the city of London_ ), by Richard Maidstone, describes the public celebration of this reconciliation. 
> 
> For Christmas that year, the grateful Londoners presented Anne with a pelican, which according to [medieval bestiary lore](http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast244.htm) would wound itself to feed its offspring with its own blood. It was therefore used in art and literature as a symbol of Christ's sacrifice, or more generally of parental, and specifically maternal, sacrifice. 
> 
> (They also gave Richard a camel, probably not because of any particular symbolism but because giving kings exotic-to-English-people animals for the royal menagerie was just a thing they did. It doesn't figure into the story at all, I just thought it might entertain you to know about it.)

**December 1392**

"Do you suppose they really wound themselves?" Anne asks Richard. "You know, to feed their children?" 

Anne is contemplating the pelican given to her for Christmas by the civic authorities of London; chained and collared, it is a fairly ridiculous sight, jessed to its perch like a hawk but nothing so majestic. Not that she can't sympathize with the poor creature. When she'd come to England herself she'd seemed no less strange to its people, for it is a custom of the English to regard anything unfamiliar as barbarian, even if the unfamiliar quantity was the daughter of one emperor and the sister of another (in all but name) and had come from the greatest city in Europe. She has always been willing to forgive England anything, since it had produced Richard after all, but she still secretly feels that the most sophisticated Londoner would feel downright rustic if he were to see Prague.

"That's what the bestiaries say," Richard says. "I suppose they would know."

"I don't suppose this one has children, anyway," Anne says. "Or if it does they're probably far away."

Richard presses himself to her back, wrapping his arms around her and bending in to kiss her temple, and she covers his hands with her own. "Anne," he says, "are you feeling melancholy again?"

"No," she says. "Well. Maybe a little."

It has been six months, almost, since the last time Anne miscarried. She had been certain that it would last, this time, and it had, long enough that she'd felt the first flutterings of life in her womb. She'd even stayed at Sheen when Richard, quarreling with the London guildsmen, had gone to hold court at York; difficult as it was to be parted from him for so long, they had agreed that the child's safety was most important. 

Not long after he had gone, she'd awakened to agonizing cramps, her thighs sticky with blood. Her first confused thought was _The baby can't come now, Richard's not here_ and then she'd remembered that Corpus Christi had just passed, and her courses had only stopped around Quinquagesima. 

The rest of that night she keeps locked away deep in her memory where she won't have to look at it. When Richard had returned the expectation in his face, after nearly a month apart, had been heartbreaking; he had said nothing but, when he realized what had happened, extended his arms to her and held her while she wept. 

Later that summer she had knelt before him, in the sight of God and hundreds of citizens, on behalf of London. The grief had still been raw then, a wound that ached all the more for being hidden. They had called her their help and their hope, for now she is Good Queen Anne to them and not merely a dumpy and expensive foreign girl with a strange accent and stranger customs who brought only an outlandish retinue, and she had set aside her own grief in order to take theirs upon herself. 

Perhaps, Anne thinks, watching the pelican flap its ungainly wings, even though they had not known, somehow they'd _understood._

"You know I'll love you always," Richard says, his lips against her hair, "even if we never have children." 

Anne steps out of his arms, taking his hand to lead him to the window; she undoes the icy latch and their fingers intertwine as they look out over the city, its rooftops blanketed with snow. She smiles up at him, feeling the warmth of his fingers against her chilled hand.

" _They_ are my children," she says.

**Author's Note:**

>  **the daughter of one emperor...greatest city in Europe:** Prague became the capital of the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of Anne's father, Charles IV. Her half-brother Wenceslaus IV was elected King of the Romans in 1376, but he was never formally crowned emperor and was deposed in 1400 (he remained King of Bohemia until his death in 1419 albeit with a brief hiccup in 1402-03 when he was overthrown and imprisoned by his younger half-brother Sigismund).
> 
> There is no evidence that Anne suffered a miscarriage in 1392 -- that part of the story is my own invention/speculation. It is possible that she had one earlier -- a letter written to Wenceslaus around 1384 suggests, thanks to the wording of the Latin, that she may have been pregnant at the time of composition. See Kristen Geaman, "A Personal Letter Written by Anne of Bohemia," _English Historical Review_ 128 (2013), pp. 1086-1094. It _is_ , however, true that she did not accompany Richard to York that summer, which was very unusual as they nearly always traveled together (the only other lengthy separation was Richard's expedition to Scotland in 1385). The story implies that she has miscarried several times. 
> 
> The feast of **Corpus Christi** falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and is thus generally in early or mid-June. In 1392, it was June 13. **Quinquagesima,** the last Sunday before Lent, fell on February 25.


End file.
